Cultivating Communities of Practice: Making Them Grow

Communities of Practice are everywhere (Wenger, 1998).

While this may be the case, it is possible to examine an organisation and find empty spaces where opportunities to cultivate communities of practice (CoPs) exist, and as one does, many questions relating to how this journey is best started begin to arise. As there is general agreement amongst a number of CoP scholars that communities of practice cannot be designed or created (Barab et al, 2002, Wenger & Snyder, 2000), seeking to learn about best practice in encouraging these communities to develop is the next step.

While there is agreement that CoPs cannot necessarily be designed or created, a number of researchers have suggested ways in which the environment and conditions within an organisation might be cultivated or nurtured in order to promote the growth of CoPs (McDermott, n.d., Wenger, 2002) and/or questions that must be carefully considered before beginning (Sidnick & White, 2008, esflive, 2009). McDermott (n.d.) suggests, even launching a single community involves considerable preparation to insure [sic] its success.

With McDermotts emphasis on the need to give the cultivation of CoPs careful consideration and planning, it is this launching or emergence of CoPs that has been examined further through the development of a multimedia resource based on this topic.

The multimedia resource focuses on the key concepts, issues, questions and considerations related to cultivation of communities of practice and has been developed to give the viewer/reader a strong theoretical understanding of this area. The transcript of the multimedia resource is attached as appendix A.

Overall, the research promotes stepping forward very carefully when deciding to go about cultivating Communities of Practice, and when examining the Start-up toolkits offered by McDermott (n.d) and Wenger (2002) it is clear to see there is a wide range of questions to ask of the organisation, the participants and the general tenor of the organisation and participants together. There is a wide range of needs for education of community members about the features of an effective Community of Practice.

However, this seems to fly in the face of the opening sentence of this paper and of the generally held perception that most people will, at one time or another, have participated or be participating in vibrant and energetic communities of practice. If people have been and continue to be participating in such communities without the need for any formal training or preparation, it may be prudent to ask why such detailed and complex questioning and preparation is required when considering cultivating some, or more, within an organisation.

While this multimedia resource and paper does not attempt to address this question, it is one that would be worth following up on in the future. Research may or may not show that the methods of cultivation of communities of practice within an organisation or business model may differ from methods of cultivation of communities of practice outside of a business or organisational model.

This being said, with the fundamental purpose of a community of practice being to create, expand, and exchange knowledge, and to develop individual capabilities (Wenger et al, 2002) it is clear that the research shows a number of consistently applicable fundamentals that have a significant positive impact on this as an outcome.

The attached multimedia resource attempts to present these fundamentals in a manner that is engaging and informative for the viewer/reader.

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Education

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